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JohnWilliams writes "The Sony PlayStation Network appears to be inaccessible to older ('phat') PS3 units. Players cannot play games that require a connection, even in single-player, offline mode, e.g. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Also, the system date resets to January 1, 2000. Sony is 'looking into it.' Speculation abounds that it is a bug related to 2010 being incorrectly flagged as a leap year. The newer PS3 Slim models seem to be working properly."

On my UK PS3, the date was reset to 31/12/1999 (a value you cannot input yourself manually) and then rolled over into 2000 some hours (5?) later.None of my downloaded PS1 games will start - just gives an "invalid copyright protection" error message.With the exception of Wipeout HD, none of my downloaded PS3 games will start.None of my Blu-ray game disks will start.My PlayTV device is not performing scheduled recordingsVidZone cannot be used, since it requires signing into PSN network to determine what region you're from

I wonder if ubisoft will learn anything from this...if - IF - I get tricked into buying an ubisoft "online only" game I'll make sure to see what the services guarantee are for the drm servers, and sue as soon as those are broken.

If this a hardware/firmware issue, then I hope to god for Sony's sake that there's a quick and easy fix that users can apply at home. The problem is that even if they offer everybody a free trade-in to a PS3 slim (which would be cripplingly expensive), then a lot of users, self included, won't accept this. Trading from an original 60 gig PS3 to a PS3 slim is not an upgrade. It's a downgrade.

Why? Because the original first-gen PS3s had full PS2 back-compatibility, while the more recent versions don't. People like me, who got rid of their PS2 when they picked up a PS3, are not going to be happy in the slightest if it turns out we need to start hitting Ebay for PS2s.

People like me, who got rid of their PS2 when they picked up a PS3, are not going to be happy in the slightest if it turns out we need to start hitting Ebay for PS2s.

PS2s are still available retail for $99, as far as I know. Compared to the cost of replacing all the worlds old PS3s, throwing in a PS2 as a consolation prize is no big expense, plus it depletes the warehouses, probably a convenient way to discontinue the PS2. That's what a reputable company would do. Oh, wait, this is Sony, home of the root kit. No, I guess you're just out of luck.

I just hooked my PS3 up after disconnecting it for a couple of weeks, and noticed the date was off and I couldn't connect to the PSN. Oh well, might as well read Slashdot! And I find this. Someone call James Randi, I think we found a psychic!

No, DRM is and has always been about killing 2nd hand sales. The piracy non-issue was just an excuse that no one would question whilst they went about removing your consumer rights. For over a year now publishers have been openly equating the 2nd hand market to piracy. The ultimate goal is to destroy all media they don't control, if DRM isn't stopped in the near future all games will require an authorised console, with authorised media, on an authorised display device and an authorised user and if any of these things fail authorisation then the whole system will stop working (for you at least).

So at least write to your representative (I know in the US this will do nothing but not all/.ers are in the US) about DRM.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, consoles have DRM built into the hardware. This makes it both more prevalent and more aggressive then DRM on the PC. It also makes it harder to remove.

I don't know, but they've pretty well made me decide not to get a PS3. I was waffling, so I know I'm not their target demographic in the first place, but I'm frankly sick of phone-home DRM. Here's a perfect example of it failing and locking out legitimate users.

It was refusing to install the Star Ocean Trophy set. I could get it to start Bayonetta, but when it attempted to load the first cutscene it just hung forever. Tried doing a number of things, nothing worked... And it wouldn't let me back up my data as the largest thumbdrive I own is 8gb and after removing ALL game data, installed demos and everything else I could strip, it claimed it still needed another 750mb of space (original claim was over 17gb). And of course it refuses to recognize either of my external USB HDDs as a target for backing up or reading data from...

So I started thinking "HD Failing" (it is an original PS3 after all). Figured I'd have it format the drive then reinstall and repatch my games. Nearly a 5 hour time estimate. Take a nap, wake up, see this.... "oh god damnit."

So I started thinking "HD Failing" (it is an original PS3 after all). Figured I'd have it format the drive then reinstall and repatch my games. Nearly a 5 hour time estimate. Take a nap, wake up, see this.... "oh god damnit."

AKA the "it just works" console gaming experience? Or are you running a PS3 emulator on a windows PC? I haven't had/heard that kind of agony in gaming since trying to get Wing Commander working by editing config.sys lines back in 1991-ish.

I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious, since your experience is supposed to be unpossible on a console.

It could very well be the HD picked today to start giving out, but it's kinda odd in that a friend of mine was playing Star Ocean under his profile on the system 2 hours before. Didn't have issues saving, didn't crash or anything. When we came back after grabbing a bite to eat is when the "fit hit the shan". Went to start up Star Ocean on my profile (already had a game saved at the first save point so everything had already been installe

A leap year miscalculation is no worse than the skewed random shuffle bug [slashdot.org] reported in Microsoft's browser selection screen yesterday. If that's the problem with these PS3's (which I doubt), it could be something similarly brain dead:

I ran into this problem last night trying to watch Netflix on the PS3. the Netflix disc gave me a cannot connect error.... Being a slashdot reader my first though was I'd done something weird with my router ports.. So Mucked with those for awhile first making sure I hadn't done something weird. Then I noticed the system date was wrong on the PS3. I tried "Set Time via Internet" which failed, then I Set time manually and tried Neflix again and it works as normal. I'm sure the Servers figured that a 10 year old packet was "timed out" and didn't respond (or the PS3 won't respond to communication from 10 years in the future).

There, I just pulled the above code out of my ass, and it's so damn simple! I don't claim any copyrights to this! Go ahead, copy 'n paste it into any of your products as you like (also commercial and closed source, I don't even want a mention!), if that is really to hard for you, you lame ass tinkerers!

Talk about timing: I downloaded Flower for my 5 year old, who loves just flying around in the pretty fields, and the game won't start because of this error. A single-player game, that has no multiplayer aspect, that doesn't even keep score, and it can't be played because it can't connect to the network.

I guess it's because Flower has trophy support, but really...you can't store the trophy information locally and then transmit later? I couldn't sit there, looking at the error screen, then trying to explain t

2 months ago my PS3 died (i've replaced it since)... so I decided to show to my kids what kind of games we played when I was a kid. So I dug out of the basement my old ps1, my sega genesis and my 30 years old mattel Intellivision... All of them worked. I didn't expect anything else! (now I remember why we were playing real hockey outside...) But it make me wonder, will my ps3 still be working in 15 years (or maybe 30)... A simple drm check and everything is down... I have COD warfare 2, and it has to connect to the net ?? I didn't know that.. And I sure would'nt have buy that game if I knew that...
What if the current ps3 network is not compatible with the network in 30 years.. what if sony's servers are down next year?
I have a serious question here, are we really all going toward this kind of drm in everything (tv, blueray, fridge, beds (whatever..)) or is it dying (like for the mp3s) ?

This reminds me of the "must be connected" to XBox Live to play the arcade games you purchased after you had the RRoD.

It took a while, but Microsoft gave in and made an incredibly convoluted solution to "fix" the DRM being tied to a console that died. This error is a bit more than "no trophies at this time".... but like Microsoft, Sony's DRM has showed us all the dark side of this whole "you don't own anything" mantra of this generation's consoles... (Including the Wii...)

Uhhhh...wouldn't that pretty much cover every lawsuit ever filed in history? I mean it isn't like someone is gonna go "hey I really like you, BTW I'm suing you ass!"

As for the bug, it just shows something we have ALL known for quite a long time-QA is currently extremely shitty, especially for anything having to do with gaming. Who here has NOT ever been bitten in the ass by shitty code gaming? Thought so. Why do you think every fricking games needs patches up the wazoo? Because these companies kick out some truly shitty code, why expect the consoles themselves to be any better? The first gen PS1s died quite often, the first gen Xboxes had shitty DVD drives, and of course the RRoD on the x360, and to a lesser extent the YRoD on the PS3. They just don't QA like they used to, it is the "get it out the door and we'll patch later!" attitude across the industry.

Anybody who has been gaming for awhile really shouldn't be surprised by this. Hopefully Sony will release yet another patch, that with any luck won't brick the machines, and it will be back to business as usual. That just seems to be the way things are done now, like it or not.

That would be correct; her views fall under the purview of politics and philosophy. I do not think that she ever even studied econ; she instead tried to put forth her vision of a free society, utilitarianism be damned. That's how I see it, anyways. Other than that, she wasn't a very good writer; the only book of hers I could stand was Anthem, which just so happens to be very short. She also wanted to claim that she invented libertarianism.

I understand your explanation of the bug, I'm just arguing that a game shouldn't be crippled by a simple bug that should be trivial to game avaialability offline. I'm just saying a game shouldn't be crippled by the system date. And the only reason I can think of why someone would want the date sync'd or the game made non-working due to changed system date was because of some form of DRM.

Maybe I'm wrong but this is the only reason I can think of. I just can't find it easy to accept their explanation for this, that's all.

Can it be a date bug in the PS3's hypervisor (or other internal 'security' functions)? The units that that maintains among other things the DRM and copyrights.

If that insists that the date is 29/2-2010, I can hardly imagine the number of things that will get decoded wrong.We may be lucky, that tomorrow the clock will claim it's March 1, at least that is a valid date. or the hardware will continue being 1 day behind, screwing up the DRM again tomorrow.

Lucky for me I read up on this before using my PS3 at all today.
I seem to have circumvented the issue to a degree.
I unplugged the power my wireless router and then fired up my PS3. From there, I noticed my date/time was set to 12/31/2000. In the system settings, I disabled internet connection and reset the time manually to 3/1/2010.
Now that internet was disabled, I plugged my router back in.
I tested a few games, and all worked. Granted, this does not solve the issue of trophies and getting into PSN, but at least I can play single player games until they come up with a fix.

I hope Sony gets sued to absolute oblivion over this. Not being able to play games you have paid for is abso-fucking-lutely un-acceptable for any reason other than your console being physically broken.

Jesus fuck. Suing over temporarily not being able to play a game? The "sue everybody" mentality really has gotten ridiculous.

All these goddamn DRM schemes that backfire and companies never learn.. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my DRM-free games and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone!!!

What does it have to do with DRM? Calendar bugs have been a very common part of the computing landscape for many years.

Jesus fuck. Suing over temporarily not being able to play a game? The "sue everybody" mentality really has gotten ridiculous.

Thats why I dont want to live in the US. Instead of solving problems like civilized people everyone sues right and left and demands millions in damages if you even looked angrily at someone. I demand, I want, me me me money money money for me.

We talk to each other. We try to come to an agreement. If that fails a third party might get involved, especially if it's a disagreement between a company and an individual customer.

And once all those options have been exhausted...then we might bring in an actual lawyer.

Sometimes even "talk[ing] to each other" and "try[ing] to come to an agreement" result in complaints from the Slashdot peanut gallery. A cease-and-desist notice over a fan-made derivative work, for instance, is just "talk[ing] to each other". And a lot of disagreements don't make the news until "all those options have been exhausted", which biases news coverage in favor of lawsuits.

To me, as an individual, a cease-and-desist doen't feel like you're trying to talk to me, it feels like you're trying to bully me. If you're trying to talk to me, give me a call or send me an informal email, from one human being to another.

What does it have to do with DRM? Calendar bugs have been a very common part of the computing landscape for many years.

Sorry, but what do "computer landscapes" have anything to do with being unable to play my games due to a calendar screw up?

I've been playing video games since Commander Keen was being sold as shareware on a 3.5 floppy at your local VHS rental store, and I have *never* had a single problem with my computer or video games because of a "leap year".

Well, if that's the only reason you can think of, you're not thinking very hard, are you?

Neither are you apparently, otherwise surely you'd have provided some examples of additional reasons instead of simply insulting GP.

While personally I side with GP, I will point out that games do use dates for a variety of reasons. Pokemon games starting with Gold and Silver for the GBC, and the Animal Crossing series, all have date-specific events. Of course, none of those refused to play if their internal clocks did not match the clocks of some central server. Heck, you could even set your clock to b

While people are far too quick to yell "sue" needlessly, it is a legitimate complaint that otherwise offline, single-player games should be unusable due to this glitch. Whatever happened to gracefully handling failure? A network connection has no business being a requirement (to the point of failing to play without it) for a single player game.

A network connection has no business being a requirement (to the point of failing to play without it) for a single player game.

But that's not the problem. On my PS3, an internet connection is available - I can browse the web just fine, but I can't log in to the Playstation Network.

Also, a network connection is not normally required for these games. The problem appears to have something to do with trophies - games that would normally work offline just fine, give an error if you have previously been connected to the network. It now tries to "sync trophies" and fails. If you had been playing purely offlinem I don't think this big woul

We are talking about electronics and software here, It all has bugs and potential failures, you don't sue when your fridge breaks down, you don't sue when your TV shorts, you either return it under warranty or if out of warranty you buy a new one or get it repaired. I hate sony with a passion, but for christs sake it's a mass produced piece of electronics, it is gonna have bugs. People are just lucky they will probably get this fixed for free, now if sony refuses to fix it THEN we can talk about suing.

Well, you'd be wrong. Where does a product being covered by a warranty mean that you can sue the manufacturer for it not working? It just means that they need to replace or repair it if it is faulty. Not that any of the "fat" PS3s are under warranty anymore.

The DRM for games purchased on PlayStation Network seems to require that it be able to phone home and validate everything before it lets you play the game. This is impacting all of the games I've tested so far which were purchased from the PlayStation Network. Many of them just fail with an inscrutable error message ("Error HEXADECIMALSOUP") and refuse to start up. Others give you "demo version" mode and behave like you need to purchase the full product still.

Calendar bugs are one thing, but DRM which fails and locks you out of a bunch of stuff you paid for in the presence of such a bug is another thing entirely. If Sony gives me a nice discount voucher or PSN credit by way of apology for this inconvenience, I'll be less peeved, but I get the feeling that Sony (and their ilk) consider their self-rights-protection technology to be so damned important that no amount of inconvenience on the part of their paying customers is too much to ask. They'd be more concerned if a calendar bug allowed you to bypass all that license-key crap.

It's more than that - I can't use my Netflix disc - there is NOTHING to do with trophies on that. Every single game I have has some sort of trophy involved, so I'm essentially stuck with $2,000 worth of games I CAN'T PLAY, not what i wanted, especially since I'm on playthrough #22 of Heavy Rain.

The only thing that works, is internet browsing, and playstation 1 games - EVERYTHING ELSE is busted (except my linux install, that works no problemo

Calm down. They didn't do this on purpose, it was a bug, an accident. Accidents happen. No-one is to blame.

It sounds like you need to get out of the basement, go take a walk, and interact with the regular 3D world for a change and come back to your PS3 in a few days when Sony have fixed it. I'm no corporate apologist, but if you can't survive without your PS3 for a few days then its you who has a problem and not Sony.

Seriously, you ignorant people need to quit using phrases like that. I'm independent, I travel the globe, and I work towards getting mankind out into space by working on new artificial plant lighting. Get your head out of your ass so you can actually see, eh?

"go take a walk,"

Hard to do with a crippled leg.

"interact with the regular 3D world for a change and come back to your PS3 in a few days when Sony have fixed it."

Because the other alternative is . . . . not waiting for Sony to fix it? Forcing Sony to hire a team of time-traveling coders to travel back in time and fix the bug before it happened? I fail to see what alternative there is besides waiting for a few days. Deciding to sue Sony won't make your PS3 work any sooner than just doing something else for a few days and then coming back and installing the update that they put out to fix this.

More likely, people will simply say "uhuh, it is broken, lets get new one", will go out and buy new one. This bug could end up being quite profitable: people will either come to service center and get software update (or just do get it done by friend) or they will buy new hardware.

Which is same reason why DRM scheme issues are never issue for average consumer because it either works just fine or end up not being big enough deal. It is customers who never learn.

It happened because two different time tracking systems disagreed with each other and were stupid. System 1 said "It's February 29th, 2010", and passed it to System 2. System 2 says "WHOA, that's impossible, nuke it from orbit and start over".
Why did they do it like that? Who knows?

the clock that is displayed on-screen is just some application level date. it's for 'display purposes only. changing this has no effect on DRM licenses restrictions (such as when you download a movie with an authorization to watch it once over the next 7 days).the 'real' ps3 clock is a hardware device (I guess they changed model between the 'phat' and 'slim' hardware releases, which is why slim is not affected). this clock has read-only access via the hypervisor only.i don't think it's even possible to rese